Free Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All by Paul A. Offit M.D. Page A

the pertussis vaccine, Marge Grant, whose son Scott had been prominently featured in Vaccine Roulette , submitted written testimony. “Before I go into the grave injustice we’ve encountered through the entire court system, including the U.S. Supreme Court,” she wrote, “I wish to re-emphasize that Scottie did NOT display a ‘fever’ after any of the shots.” Consistent with Grant’s testimony, most of the children in Berkovic’s study hadn’t had seizures that were precipitated by fever, either.
    Third: parents were right in pointing out that no one else in the family had had epilepsy. During Vaccine Roulette , Marge Grant took aim at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), elicited the support of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, and skewered pharmaceutical companies for misrepresenting, hiding, or shredding data. But during Hawkins’s hearing, Grant also directed her anger toward doctors. “As I look back at this nightmare and the severity of Scott’s injury,” she recalled, “I do not believe he is just one unusual, obscure case, who displayed almost no early symptoms, yet suffered profound permanent damage. I am convinced there is an extremely fine line, such as in Scott’s instance, where major vaccine problems exist, but actually go undetected by parents until much later, when they are finally told the child’s developmental deficits must be genetic. Can you imagine the trauma that must hit a parent? If they felt it was genetic, they would probably never have another child.” Grant knew that neither her own nor her husband’s family had a history of epilepsy or retardation. But she hadn’t understood that not all genetic problems are inherited. Samuel Berkovic subsequently addressed this issue in his study. He noted, “In nine of the eleven patients with SCN1A mutations for whom samples from both parents were available, the mutations were absent in parental DNA and thus arose de novo .” This meant that the genetic mutation had occurred spontaneously during conception.
    Soon after Samuel Berkovic published his paper, Simon Shorvon and Anne Berg, researchers in England and the United States, wrote an editorial discussing the importance of its findings. “If properly communicated,” they wrote, “the Australian findings should also do much to improve the public’s understanding of the true risks and the safety of this vaccine.” During the pertussis scares in England and the United States, scares that spilled over into virtually every developed country in the world, thousands of media outlets falsely alerted parents to the harm caused by pertussis vaccine. But when Samuel Berkovic finally found the answer to the question of what had actually caused the problem, no one noticed. Not a single newspaper, magazine, or radio or television program carried the story.

CHAPTER 4
     
    Roulette Redux
     
    If you watch TV you know less about the world than if you just drink gin out of a bottle.
    —GARRISON KEILLOR
     
     
     
    L ea Thompson began DPT: Vaccine Roulette in 1982 with a clear statement of purpose: “Our job in the next hour is to provide enough information so that there can be an informed discussion about this important subject. It affects every single family in America.” Unfortunately, throughout Vaccine Roulette , Thompson did much to misinform her viewers.
    When Thompson interviewed Larry Baraff of the UCLA Medical Center about his study of the side effects of pertussis vaccine, she said, “The study estimates one of every seven hundred children had a convulsion or went into shock.” But Baraff’s study never mentioned the word s hock . Rather, it described nine children who developed hypotonic hyporesponsive episodes, in which a child is temporarily limp and unresponsive. The hallmark of shock is low blood pressure resulting in decreased blood flow to critical organs. No such problem was mentioned in Baraff’s study nor has such a problem ever been found to be caused by pertussis